writer, performer and activist Julia Serano's blog! most posts will focus on gender & sexuality; trans, queer & feminist politics; music & performance; and other stuff that interests or concerns me. find out more about my various creative endeavors at juliaserano.com

Wednesday, October 1, 2014

[note added January, 2017: This essay now appears as a chapter in my third book Outspoken: A Decade of Transgender Activism and Trans Feminism]For the record: this essay is intended to clarify misconceptions about, and to encourage more thoughtful usage of, cis terminology. Anyone who references this piece in their attempts to deny or eliminate use of the term "cis" (and its variants) is clearly misinterpreting or misrepresenting my views.

My first book Whipping Girl helped to popularize cis terminology—that is, language that uses the prefix
“cis” to name the unmarked dominant majority (i.e., people who are not trans)
in order to better articulate the ways in which trans people are marginalized
in society. In 2009, I wrote a blog post called Whipping Girl FAQ on cissexual, cisgender, and cis privilege that explained my reasoning in forwarding cis terminology and addressed some of
the more common arguments made against such language. That blog post ended with
a section discussing some of the limitations of cis terminology and the concept
of cis privilege—a topic that I will revisit in this two-part series.

Over the years, I have observed that many people now use cis
terminology in a manner that is somewhat different from how I attempted to use
it in Whipping Girl, thus leading to
potential ambiguity—I will address such matters in this first essay. In the
last section of this essay, I will suggest another possible model for describing
how people are differentially viewed and treated with regards to gender
non-conformity, and which may (in some cases) provide a more effective
framework than a cisgender/transgender dichotomy.

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About Me

Julia Serano is an Oakland, California-based writer, performer, speaker, and biologist. She is the author of the recent book "Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive" (Seal Press, 2013). Her first book "Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity" (Seal Press, 2007) has been used as teaching materials in gender studies, queer studies, social studies, human sexuality and psychology courses across North America.